Beyond: Two Souls

It seems inevitable that the discussion around Beyond: Two Souls will focus on what the game is not, rather than what it actually is.

There will be considerable hand-wringing about whether or not Beyond: Two Souls is a game or more comfortably fits some other description, and if its lack of challenge somehow makes it less worthy of your attention or gaming time.

However, taken on its own merits, Beyond: Two Souls is a triumph of interactive storytelling, betrayed only perhaps by not quite living up to its lofty narrative ambitions in its latter third.

Historically, video games typically feature two core elements. First, they act as “games” in the traditional sense, complete with a structured set of challenges within a rules framework for a player to overcome. Second, they act as storytelling vehicles, using the interaction between the gamer and the game to enhance a narrative structure.

Earlier in the medium’s history, video games were mostly just “games.” But now, more often than not, top-tier titles offer a mix of both game and narrative elements.*

Unfortunately, despite the multitude of different ways to interact with video games, one of them unfortunately shares a name with the medium, and therefore is often treated as the more legitimate criteria.

The pedantic cry of “it’s not really a game,” may not mean much, but it’s thrown about with surprising frequency in the discussion of video games as a medium.

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With Beyond: Two Souls, Quantic Dream seems to take the refrain of “it’s not really a game” as a challenge, discarding all forms of interaction that don’t further the narrative. There are forms of challenge in the game, but they’re there entirely as storytelling devices. While there are plenty of niche titles that do this, Beyond: Two Souls and Quantic Dream’s 2010 title Heavy Rain are the only big-budget games to fully commit to this philosophy.

Which is to say that you won’t be doing a lot of dying when playing through Beyond: Two Souls, or really doing much past simply living the life of Jodie Holmes (Ellen Page) — a young girl who’s tied to a mysterious spectral entity named Aiden — from age eight to age 23.

Playing out over non-linearly across 26 chapters from Jodie’s life (each lasting between 20- to 90-minutes), the game is perhaps less akin to a visual novel and more like a season box set of a good sci-fi television show. Each episode contains its own narrative arc, setting and, in some cases, unique characters, while feeding into the overall narrative mystery of Jodie and Aiden.

Gameplay consists of moving Jodie and Aiden around using relatively the traditional third-person controls of a gamepad, or a somewhat restrictive set of commands using a connected touch device such as an iPad or an Android phone. Since Aiden is incorporeal and can move through walls, each environment often consists of using him and Jodie in tandem to best explore your surroundings.

If you’re playing the game with another person on the couch, you can split the controls of Jodie and Aiden between the two of you. In some circumstances, you are thrust into Quick Time Events where you have to quickly tap a particular direction to make Jodie succeed at an action. In most cases, these QTEs are almost impossible to fail.

Although the game has a series of high-tension action sequences, some of which are quite thrilling, Beyond: Two Souls works best when it’s running you through the smaller moments in Jodie’s life. It’s funny, but the sequence of Jodie preparing dinner for her hunky CIA co-worker was far more tense (What happens if supper gets burnt!) than an extended chase sequence of her escaping a S.W.A.T. team.

In fact, its these smaller moments that truly elevate the game. There is one extended sequence just before Beyond‘s half way point which has you living through some very trying circumstances in Jodie’s life. In these small, intimate moments the game has you doing some very basic things that haven’t been tried in a video game before, or at least not big-budget ones like Beyond: Two Souls. The fact that the game lingers here (the low-key sequence is close to the longest one in the game), shows a bravery and confidence in its storytelling.

Of course, in the past Quantic Dream and director David Cage have also shown a lot of bravery in storytelling. All three of the studio’s previous games have told interesting, non-traditional stories, and focused on using the interactive medium to enhance the gamer’s immersion in the day-to-day lives of the game’s characters.

However, Beyond: Two Souls is the first David Cage game to really show a confidence in storytelling. Unlike previous games, there are far fewer eye-rolling Cage-esque ticks that pop up. For example, enjoyment of Heavy Rain mostly rests on how easily a person can ignore the occasionally awful voice acting (where all the children in the story inexplicably speak with French accents).

There’s none of that in Beyond: Two Souls, or at least very little.** This isn’t to say that Cage’s artistic voice is muted. The game is still full of Cage-isms — the tone of each episode is often set by distinctive weather events for example — but it isn’t a game where you really have to dig past some shoddy choices to get to the good ideas underneath; its good on the surface too.

A lot of the reason for that is the excellent central performance from Ellen Page (the actress of Juno fame) as Jodie. Performance capture has been implemented into games for a few years now, but this is the first game where it’s been used to convey a nuanced performance showing the growth of a character through a multitude of circumstances.

Traditionally in video games, shortcomings in the technology limit character’s emotional states to exaggerated extremes to ensure the correct emotion is being read by the gamer. But here, Page is allowed to give readings that are muted and reserved, allowing for far more range in her performance.

The result is one of the most complete characters in video games, someone who’s allowed to change over the course of the 15 years of her life that we follow. None of it would work if Page were simply phoning her performance in; its clear she’s giving as much of herself to Beyond: Two Souls as she does any of her other roles, more in some cases.

Sadly, Willem Dafoe — who shares above the title billing with Page — plays a much more thinly sketched character (in fact there are probably two other characters who get more “screen time” than he does). He isn’t bad by any means, but he’s just not in the game as much as you might expect.

Part of the reason Page’s performance comes through is how good the game looks. Beyond: Two Souls is the best looking game that has been released for the PlayStation 3 (yes, that includes The Last of Us), and there’s an argument to be made for it being the best-looking game on any current generation console.

(Beyond: Two Souls and The Last of Us collectively show the strength of single platform development.)

Admittedly, a lot of the graphical “wow” factor comes from the fact that many of Beyond: Two Souls‘s scenes aren’t especially fast moving (the game chugs in the few moments where a whole lot of things are going on).***

Really, the biggest issue with Beyond: Two Souls is that last few episodes fall into some fairly predictable action movie tropes, and fail to focus on the game’s core strength, namely its intimacy with its characters.

Which isn’t to say that the end of the game isn’t satisfying — the story does wrap up nicely with a fun teaser for more — just that it feels less special than it could have.

The lack of consequence in the game feels a little bit limiting as well. Most of the sequences are pretty easy to “get right” or don’t even have a way to fail in such a way that there are lasting repercussions. Heavy Rain had several sequences that could significantly alter the way its conclusion played out. Here it seems far more likely that you’ll get to the end with your narrative sitting pretty close to everyone else’s.

Generally, it would probably be fair to say that Heavy Rain was more interesting from an interactivity perspective, while Beyond: Two Souls tells a better told and better performed story.

Since the release of Heavy Rain in 2010, a lot of narrative-first games, such as last year’s The Walking Dead, have hit the market. However, with Beyond: Two Souls, Quantic Dream and David Cage show that continue to stand out in that space when working with a huge budget, and that finally they are able to produce titles that succeed without weird ticks or artistic blind-spots.

I chewed through Beyond: Two Souls much like I did Orange Is The New Black when it popped up on Netflix. Hopefully, this is just the first of many games to utilize this same format.

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* A third more recently evolved type of video game interaction is the “sandbox” element, which offers unfettered play within a set of constraints, but without a specific set of goals and victory conditions. Minecraft is an example of a title which thrives on this. Grand Theft Auto V is a perfect illustration of a game that has all three of these types of interactions, and is also a good example of how the three styles of play sometimes contradict and negate each other.

** References to the “infraworld” hearkened back to characters insisting on saying “amphibicopter” over and over again in Steven Speilberg’s AI.

*** Beyond also does the fun trick of using the system’s entire power just to render Jodie’s face on the title screen, which makes the PS3 look like it can do things it really can’t do. The last game to try that trick was Shenmue in 1999.

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